Provence, France - Fresh Confidence

in late june and early july, my sister and i traveled with a friend, e*, from aix en provence to arles to avingon, and, since we had a car, we visited many other towns. on the first night my sister asked me if i had the toothpaste (we had decided to share a tube for the sake of space). e* came out of the bathroom and offered us hers - colgate's fresh confidence. my immediate comment, "that sounds like a feminine hygiene product," was met with a quizzical look. e* is originally from germany, and i guess the massengill commercial where the daughter asks her mother about a "not so fresh feeling" was not dubbed into german.

so is the reason colgate actually named a product fresh confidence that the advertising and marketing staff were not in the us in the 1980s or are they just too young to remember? or maybe someone higher up in the company came up with the name, and i can only guess that his/her subordinates were too embarrassed to explain why the name might make customers snicker and be accidentally stocked in the feminine hygiene aisle

after visiting the fresh confidence web site, i have to go with the too young to remember argument. colgate appears to be appealing to teens and maybe the adult swim market, as they have cartoons featuring "the confidentals" - a group of college kids who somehow have all of their problems solved with a squirt of fresh confidence. the tag line: get fresh with the confidentals. i didn't realize that toothpaste could turn into a mobile phone or silence your roommate's music by turning into a pair of headphones that plug into the stereo. all along i thought that fresh confidence only got rid of a female's not so fresh feeling. maybe colgate should show that in a cartoon.

Things to Do - Remove from Mailing List

i know that i get a lot of mail. our postal person tends to leave catalogues in a pile by our mailboxes, and, of the five apartments, mine gets the most. i've been an online buyer for years: clothes, bedspreads, air filters, cat filters, cat trees, rugs, face cream, furniture, music, books, vitamins, protein powder, gluten-free products, shoes... couple that with a modest amount of magazine subscriptions and you have a whole lot of catalogues from places i've shopped and those i hope never to shop at as well as offers for "free trials" from a number of magazines which i've always been able to resist (even though it would have been so easy to tear off the perforated reply card and worry about paying later). oh, i forgot to mention that donations to charities will certainly lead to a mailbox that you have to empty daily. those mailing labels and notepads they send to entice or guilt you into donating certainly are bulky.

i spent some time on saturday emailing a few businesses, requesting to be removed from mailing lists. i just spent another fun half hour emailing a few more. while i'm going to be forwarding my mail to m*'s parents house, i don't want them to have to deal with the onslaught of junk mail or pay to ship it to the uk. so to those who are moving or just want to cut down on the amount of unsolicited mailings, give yourself some time.

oh, a very helpful number that i found on an american express mailing is 1-888.5.OPT.OUT. i get so many offers from cc companies and banks that sometime include checks to use for balance transfers, and i am worried (ok, a bit paranoid) about what happens if they don't get forwarded or forwarded correctly. i thought that i had to contact each company separately, but it turns out by calling this number "you can choose to stop receiving "prescreened" offers of credit from us and other companies."

businesses/ organizations contacted in the month or so before leaving (there were so many more but, oh god, how i came to detest this task!)
sierra club
spcala
amnesty international
kcet
crate and barrel
j crew
vermont country store
loehmann's
pier 1
wine spectator
skinstore.com
the territory ahead
covenant house
national audubon society
(while i emailing the audubon, i thought of the plight of the wandering albatross. over 100,000 are killed every year due to commercial fishing practices which could, seemingly, be easily modified. i ended making a small donation to birdlife international.)
staples
bank account #1
(still keeping but finally cancelling paper statements)
ll bean
flor
sharper image
kitten rescue
la opera
ucla alumin
aaa
ralphs
footsmart
blick art supplies
national park foundation
dansk
santa monica college
national parks and conservation association
hammacher schlemmer
office depot
doctors without borders
oriental trading company (what is this?!)

Saying goodbye to Marques Wyatt

i'm not worried about missing live music while in cambridge, as i know it's a college town where many bands schedule a stop on their tours. as for djs, of course england is full of them. so i shouldn't worry about not getting my house music fix, right? well, i was already a bit nostalgic for deep, a weekly house club hosted by marques wyatt. it's true that now i don't get out to see him and his guest djs spin nearly as much as i used to or as much as i'd like, but it was always reassuring to know that i could go lose myself in house music any sunday night. my friend, shawn, and i get the weekly deep emails, and we either weigh-in on the merits of the featured dj or track down someone who had at least heard of them.

so, i'm at trader joes today in santa monica, and i see marques. he's such a familiar face to me, and i'm sure i was smiling at him, that "hey you're my friend and it's good to see you" smile. i went back to shopping, and, luckily, marques' aisle wanderings followed mine. my second instinct, after the smiling, was to pretend i had no idea who he was. in los angeles, one is trained to ignore celebrities, to make them feel as anonymous or "regular" as possible while stealing glances at them and taking photos with mobile phones (i actually started saying mobile vs cell a few years ago. it's not just because i'm heading off to england). but as i lingered by the cereals, with marques checking out the strawberries, i realized that this man has brought me much joy and he should know it. plus, even though it had been years, i had talked to him in the early days of deep.

of course marques was very cool when i told him that i'd be leaving los angeles and i'd miss deep. he was kind enough to say that he had thought i'd looked familiar, but that's probably just because i seem to have quite a few doppelgangers out there. i could have gushed to him about how seeing frankie knuckles in 2002 was such a memorable night that shawn and i talk about it with the same reverence as when people describe the birth of their first child or how, in my slightly tipsy state, i tried to convince my friends that king britt and i were tight friends after a short chat at the bar. but, i said goodbye quickly, feeling good that i paid my respects but wanting to stay until he promised that he'd keep deep going until i return to los angeles.

when i returned to work, i had an email from shawn with the subject "deep farewell." to her question of, "What do you think of checking out Ben Watt on July 30th," i replied, "oh, that we must do." since i'll be done work in early august and can actually stay out until the 4am closing time, we just might get to check out charles webster, joe clausel and andy caldwell as well.